When the sad news arrived yesterday that JG Ballard had died, it wasn't just literature that lost one of its most singular voices. For as anyone with even a passing interest in post-punk or new rave will know, Ballard was a huge inspiration to musicians. In fact, when critics described Klaxons' debut album as "Ballardian" – an epithet now recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary – most of us had an idea of how it might sound.

There were other influential modern writers before him – William Burroughs, for example – and there have been more since (the entire cyber-punk genre that Ballard spawned), but no one has so consistently pursued a vision through a life's work and been so influential to musicians. While Burroughs effectively spoofed science fiction, Ballard reinvented it by giving it a soul and a conscience, and in doing so provided a cornerstone between music, fashion, literature and emerging philosophical constructs such as psychogeography.

Ballard's vision was a dystopian that entranced a host of young musicians. Consider the cold clinical sounds created in the late 70s by those who filtered punk's nihilistic worldview through synthesisers and tape loops, chief among them Cabaret Voltaire and This Heat, whose music had the same transporting effect as Ballard's prose, or Warm Leatherette by the Normal, a song that almost single-handedly invented minimalist electro.

It is only a few steps from Ballard's fetishisation of automobiles and terminal velocity in Crash to Warm Leatherette and then on to Gary Numan's Cars.

Ballard's lexicon extends to inspiring song titles and bands too: from the Joy Division track Atrocity Exhibition through to Empire of the Sun (the latest band formed by former Sleepy Jackson frontman Luke Steele) via many more as previously discussed.

So why exactly is Ballard such an influence? Well, he took a fear of unknown futures – "the deep currents beneath the surface" – and brought them into the present day. Whether that was the paranoia that surrounded nuclear warfare in the 60s and 70s, the emerging CCTV culture of the 80s and 90s or the detached, anonymous lives we now lead today behind the digital curtain of the internet, Ballard's sense of fear has translated across eras and into the bands of each age.

The music inspired by Ballard is much like his work: affecting, foreboding, clinical, dispossessed, disembodied and, occasionally, pornographic. "Crossing frontiers is my profession," he said in 2002. And while "Ballardian music" is outwardly anti-blues/anti-rockist, more conventional artists couldn't help but be inspired too. Suede's sound might have been a retro-leaning Bowie/Smiths homage, but their lyrics depicting high rises, asphalt underpasses and dysfunctional lovers adrift in the city are unashamedly Ballardian.

Unlike other countercultural literary touchstones (Burroughs, Burgess and Bukowksi among them), Ballard's influence on music is increasingly evident and expansive. Dubstep is perhaps the most obvious offspring of his work – Hyperdub Records cite him as an influence, while Burial's Untrue album could be a soundtrack to any number of his novels.

Ballard was often described as a "rock'n'roll writer" but that doesn't do him justice – or any of the bands he inspired. Immerse yourself in the world of a Ballardian band and you'll realise they're far more inventive, and important, than that.